Al-Ahram Weekly
29 April – 5 May 1999
As I write these lines, the NATO campaign is a month old, with none of the alliance’s announced objectives anywhere near being accomplished. The tyrannical and xenophobic regime of Slobodan Milosevic is still in power, gathering more Serbian adherents, even from among his former enemies in the country. Dissidents, democratic opposition figures, anti-government radio stations and papers have either been silenced or now support him against NATO, an unsurprising thing given that the increasingly damaging air campaign is correctly perceived as a war against all of Serbia.
The atrocities in Kosovo have also increased, with more refugees, more destroyed villages, and more (rather than less) Serbian troops creating havoc in a place that is supposedly being protected from further ravages. This is by far the worst of NATO’s miscalculations, for which the starkest proof is the clear unreadiness of the attacking countries to deal with the refugee crisis. An added complication is, in my opinion, the strong likelihood that very few of the refugees will truly be repatriated, their homes and villages restored, their lives resumed. I hope I am wrong.
To Palestinians of my generation, the dispossession of the entire Palestinian people and the creation of Israel in 1948 were like this, without CNN and without the triumphalism of Clinton, Blair and Solano blathering on about Western values and humanitarian missions. It is worth reminding readers that every year since l948 the UN General Assembly has re-affirmed Resolution 194, which allows Palestinian refugees the right of return and/or compensation for their losses. After 51 years of such resolutions, no less well-intentioned than what NATO spokesmen are daily reiterating ,the Palestinians are still in exile, still dispossessed and Israel, which played the Milosevic role in l948, continues to dispossess Palestinians on a daily basis. A major irony is that Israel’s desire to appear on the side of NATO has extended as far as offering about 120 Kosovar refugees asylum in Israel, on a kibbutz that stands on Palestinian land seized in l948; where the village once existed, nothing of its past owners, neither names, nor possessions, nor memory survives. Such is the logic of history and, it must be said, the logic of the conqueror.
A third disaster is that there can be no properly forecast end either to the campaign or to the Serbian resistance. If the fate of Iraq provides any lesson or indication at all, the strong probability is that a few months hence Milosevic will still be in power, Serbia will be devastated, and the Serbian civilian population will be paying the heaviest price. Every day brings further evidence that Bill Clinton, architect of the air war, has brought his own pathology, rather than good sense, knowledge or humanity, to the crisis. A recent book on Clinton by the British journalist Christopher Hitchens, certainly the best book on the Clinton administration to emerge since the Arkansas man came to power, is entitled No One Left To Lie To, almost an understatement in terms of what Clinton as president has done, from betraying his election promises, selling out his party, proclaimed ideals, family, friends as well as numerous women, to using the federal government as a special vehicle for his sordid schemes.
Not the least of Hitchens’s arguments is that Clinton ought to have been impeached, not for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but for the bombing of Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq, all of them raided illegally and without clear provocation. There is considerable evidence now that Clinton has used the Kosovo crisis as a way of repairing the damage he caused himself over Lewinsky (this was also true in the earlier raids) with scarcely a thought either for the war’s cost in human life, treasure, or material damage, or for its conclusion.
For not only has the NATO action been undertaken without a formal declaration of war by the US Congress, but there has been little thought given as to how such a war is supposed to achieve ends that are as nebulous and ill-defined as these are. What is to be the status of Kosovo? What of the Kosovar Serbs? On what grounds are “the ethnic Albanians”, as the media persists in calling them, going to be offered a new future, where, and in what relationship to Serbia, which still has uncontested sovereignty over the province? These are some of the basic questions upon which Clinton and his pet allies, the egregious Tony Blair and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, haven’t yet paused to reflect.
In this conspiracy of silence fobbed onto the vast American public, the media has played the most extraordinary role of propaganda and encouragement, which seems to get worse every day. Obviously Serbian propaganda has been playing its own role, which I make no attempt to justify or minimise. There is a vicious politics of identity at work in Yugoslavia, intensified by both the media and the opponents. But CNN and its co-conspirators, including the BBC, have played the part of a cheering partisan team.
Last week, I appeared on BBC Television and at one point had to remind the announcer who was questioning me that he should lower his voice and allow me to speak without further interruptions. When I drew attention to the shortcomings of the NATO position, he started screaming at me, demanding why I justified Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing and how, as a Palestinian, I could endorse the ethnic cleansing of “fellow Muslims”. Most TV broadcasters refer to the NATO forces as “ours” and regularly challenge military consultants about the folly of not using ground troops and attacking more Serbian targets, including Serbian television itself.
No journalist has dared raise the question of how it is that the number of refugees has actually increased since the bombing began (the bombing, that is, that was supposed to save them), and any suggestion that NATO may have made matters worse is scarcely given a hearing, especially since the war has now spilled over into Montenegro, Albania and has had serious internal repercussions in Greece, a member of NATO.
The cooperation between NATO government spokesmen and journalists has in effect eliminated real investigative reporting (we know next to nothing of what has happened inside Kosovo, except that, far from stopping Serb atrocities, NATO has managed to allow their soldiers’ number to grow — so it is impossible to know from CNN and the others what exactly is being hit, where, and with what effect). In a recent article, one media critic pointed out the way in which US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin is echoed in his assertions by CNN’s star reporter Christiane Amanpour, who just happens to be Rubin’s wife.
A further irony is that the constant references to “ethnic Albanians” obscure, if they do not altogether eliminate, the fact that most of the refugees are Muslim. Consider that whenever Hamas or Hizbullah, or Iranians or Palestinians, are referred to by the media — in particular when “terrorism” is what is being pointed out — the adjective “Muslim” never fails to appear. In Yugoslavia, the tactic used is to suggest that these are European refugees, after all, and therefore more deserving of NATO attention. Therefore the word “Muslim” is never used. I have yet to see a programme on the families of the 46,000 Kurdish victims of Turkey’s genocide, or even a mention that this genocide, as well as the continued starvation of Iraqi civilians (mostly Muslims also) is taking place right now, with active US participation (supplying NATO member Turkey with Apache helicopters and F-16s, for example). Why that isn’t considered as bad as what Milosevic is doing puzzles me, but one supposes that a higher logic is at work which ordinary human beings cannot easily comprehend.
The worst thing about the NATO campaign as it is reported in the media — remember that news today is effectively controlled by about five major transnational corporations, all of them with intimate ties to the defence industry, which has a direct interest in the war’s continuation — is not only that it simplifies the enormously complicated histories, societies and peoples that exist in the Balkans, but that, in focusing unquestioningly on what NATO says and what pictures NATO gives out, the media in effect is part of the NATO campaign, obliterating history and reality with propaganda. As British Member of Parliament Anthony Benn correctly said, the result is that democracy is threatened, to say nothing of a decent future for an estimable portion of mankind.
Perhaps the most dangerous side effect of the new Balkan war is that it may have permanently damaged the United Nations. What US power signals is that it, and it alone, can dictate the shape of things to come — intervening unilaterally where the whims of its leaders may choose, destroying, tampering with, building and re-building as it wishes for no other reason, finally, than that it CAN do so. Although I do not wish to pay him a compliment, it does seem that Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations thesis has been adopted by US policy-makers (and even a few journalists: two weeks ago on the front page of The New York Times, one of their resident pundits produced a long article suggesting that the current Balkan war proved the validity of Huntington’s thesis).
The working policy assumption therefore seems to be that the world is a dangerous place for the “West” (i.e. the US) and therefore, as Huntington says, it is always better to take the offensive directly, going into the enemy’s camp to do one’s will inside it. Only in this way can the US “encourage and enlarge” its economic power to enter also every country’s economy and profit from it.
The triumph of this idea is the triumph of a ludicrously aggressive picture of our world, since it assumes that all civilisations necessarily are in conflict and that the only basis for politics is ethnic identity, but also of a false dichotomy and a false logic, the essence of which is: either you are with us or you are against us. Thus, today the formula is that one is for NATO — i.e. for “Western” values of “humanity, democracy, decency” — or for the inhuman, atrocity-mongering tyranny of Slavic-Orthodox civilisation as represented by Slobodan Milosevic.
Formulated in such a way, one can easily see that this is a caricature of reality: no moral choices are that simple, nor in fact should they be made that simple if the world is to survive as something more than a jungle of all against all, regulated by a “free” market that is controlled by the US.
Moreover, there is a profoundly anti-democratic logic at work here, as if to say hurry up, make up your mind and join us, otherwise you will be demonised and perhaps even destroyed. The US today is the only country in the world which has intervened militarily all across the globe in the past 12 months, and has used its economic sanction power over 60 times in the past decade. With its planes flying 600-plus missions every day, with General Wesley Clark requesting more planes and more bombs and troops, and with at least a half dozen powers in possession of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons on a large scale (to say nothing of those trying to acquire them), humanity risks a great deal in the immediate future.
Unfortunately, there are no quick solutions, no ready-made tactics to replace the prevailing logic of false dichotomies or an exacerbated sense of endangered identity. But by raising self-conscious awareness of what the media at present distorts and hides, we can at least begin to stiffen our resistance to the direction and the leadership offered by men either like Milosevic, or like Clinton, who has never experienced war or any of its terrible dislocating effects, and is drunk on the miracles of high-tech electronic warfare where you do not see or come anywhere near what your victims are suffering.
The only answer is not to refuse to look at the endless pictures of refugees, but to develop the resistance that comes from a real education in philosophy and the humanities, patient and repeated criticism, and intellectual courage. Identity politics, nationalist passions and murderousness, an aggravated sense of victimhood or a saviour complex cannot be dealt with in any other way: these are universal problems requiring universalist solutions, not spontaneous war or unreflecting quick fixes.
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
© Al-Ahram 1999
